Fbi`s City Mole Charged In Murder

Raymond Wanted In Florida Case

October 01, 1986|By Joel Kaplan, Chicago Tribune. John Camper contributed to this report.

NASHVILLE — Michael Raymond, the undercover informant in the FBI`s investigation of corruption in Chicago government, was charged Tuesday with the 1975 murder and dismemberment of an elderly Florida widow.

Ft. Lauderdale police served Raymond with an arrest warrant in the federal courthouse here just after he received a jail sentence for his conviction on gun charges linked to a planned burglary of a wealthy businessman`s home.

It was that arrest in July, 1984, that prompted Raymond`s offer to lead federal authorities to corrupt politicians in Chicago in exchange for leniency. Posing as a representative of a New York company seeking bill-collecting contracts, he passed money to several Chicago aldermen and city bureaucrats, none of whom has been indicted.

If the Chicago cases produce indictments, the murder charge is certain to provide additional ammunition for defense attorneys seeking to discredit Raymond, a career criminal who has managed to keep his total prison time below eight years by frequently serving as a government informant.

Raymond, 57, showed up for his court appearance here looking like a balding overweight businessman. He wore a gray wool suit with a dark silk handkerchief in the breast pocket and a white shirt with cuff links. Asked if he had anything to say, he shook his head.

But Ft. Lauderdale authorities said Raymond`s dignified appearance and his reputation as a nonviolent white-collar criminal were deceiving. They charged that he and two accomplices brutally murdered Adelaide Stiles, 70, on July 19 or 20 in 1975 to keep her from trying to recover the $40,000 life savings she had invested in one of his companies.

Raymond had long been a suspect in the case, but Florida authorities had been unable to gather enough evidence to charge him, partly because he had been hidden for years in the federal witness-protection program. Florida police had complained privately that the FBI was shielding him from criminal prosecution.

They said their big break came about a month ago when one of the alleged accomplices, Vernon Frazier, 34, told them that Raymond had paid him $10,000 to kill the woman.

The other alleged accomplice, Robert Johnstone, 54, a longtime business associate of Raymond`s, was arrested Tuesday morning while walking a dog near his home in Port Orange, Fla.

Police charged Raymond and Johnstone with first-degree murder, punishable by death in Florida. Frazier, a former employee of the Chicago Public Library, was charged with second-degree murder, which is not a capital offense. A grand jury is expected to return formal indictments in the case soon.

``Without Frazier, there is no case,`` said Ft. Lauderdale police spokesman Ott Cefkin. He said police began questioning Frazier after reading a Chicago Tribune story in which Frazier described criminal exploits with Raymond but did not mention the Stiles murder.

In that June 1 story, Frazier said he had been Raymond`s ``puppet on a string,`` but said he had first met Raymond in a federal prison in Texas in 1983, some eight years after the Stiles disappearance. At the time of The Tribune interview, Frazier was in the San Diego jail on a charge of passing a bad check. He since has been transferred to a jail in Ft. Lauderdale.

Authorities said Stiles, a widow, had fallen in love with Raymond early in 1975 after he began squiring her to posh Florida restaurants. He soon persuaded her to invest her money in a venture to manufacture smokeless charcoal.

But Stiles began to worry that she was being conned, authorities said, and Raymond feared that she might report him to the police. They said Frazier provided the following account of Stiles` last day:

Raymond had invited her to accompany him on a European vacation. To add some romance to the journey, they would cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to Miami on Johnstone`s yacht and would get on a plane in Miami.

Once the boat was at sea, Frazier struck Stiles in the back of the head with a tire iron, shot her several times, hacked her to pieces and threw the body parts into the Atlantic Ocean. He then placed bricks in her suitcases and threw them overboard.

The suitcases have not been recovered. Police say Frazier told them the bricks had been obtained from a wall near the Ft. Lauderdale home that Johnstone and Raymond shared at the time.

``We went there, and sure enough, the bricks were still missing from the wall,`` said Cefkin, the police spokesman.

He said Frazier also identified a watch that he had removed from Stiles`

body before dismembering her. The FBI recovered the watch from a Chicago associate of Raymond`s, Cefkin said.

Raymond`s possible involvement in the disappearance of Stiles--and in the disappearances of Anne Sessa, another former girlfriend, and Max Bussard, a former business partner--became public last December after word leaked out of his involvement in the Chicago corruption inquiry. Authorities are still investigating the other two cases.